learned to look upon as after all the great matter. Of
the lessons that are impressed upon us by his whole life and work rather
than by specific teachings, perhaps the most precious is the inspiration
to live our lives thoughtfully, in no haphazard and hand-to-mouth way,
and to live always for the idea and the spirit, making all things else
subservient. He does not dazzle us with extraordinary power prodigally
spent, but he was a good steward of natural gifts, high, though below
the highest. His life of forethought and reason may be profitably
compared with a life spoiled by passion and animalism like that of Byron
or of Burns. His counsels are the fruit of this well-ordered life and
are perfectly in consonance with it. While he was a man of less striking
personality and less brilliant literary gift than some of his
contemporaries, and though his appeal was without the moving power that
comes from great emotion, we find a compensation in his greater balance
and sanity. He makes singularly few mistakes, and these chiefly of
detail. Of all the teachings of the age his ideal of perfection is the
wisest and the most permanent.

III

[Sidenote: His Teachers and his Personal Philosophy]

Arnold's poetry is the poetry of meditation and not the poetry of
passion; it comes from "the depth and not the tumult of the soul"; it
does not make us more joyful, but it helps us to greater depth of
vision, greater detachment, greater power of self-possession. Our
concern here is chiefly with its relation to the prose, and this, too,
is a definite and important relation. In his prose Arnold gives such
result of his observation and meditation as he believes may be gathered
into the form of counsel, criticism, and warning to his age. In his
poetry, which preceded the prose, we find rather the processes through
which he reached these conclusions; we learn what is the nature of his
communing upon life, not as it affects society, but as it fronts the
individual; we learn who are the great thinkers of the past who came to
his help in the straits of life, and what is the armor which they
furnished for his soul in its times of stress.

One result of a perusal of the poems is to counteract the impression
often produced by the jaunty air assumed in the prose. The real
substance of Arnold's thought is characterized by a deep seriousness; no
one felt more deeply the spiritual unrest and distraction of his age.
More than one poem is an expression